Good Week for Danes

November 11, 2008 (InfoPowa News) — Danish players have shown once again that they are among the best poker players around, with two big-money successes in the game this week.

The main event in the fourth edition of the Ladbrokes European Online Championship of Poker (LEOCOP) saw Danish online player "Hahila" best 600 players and heads up opponent "Benno26" to take home the title and the $229,500 main prize. There were 600 entrants for the event, creating a prize pool of $918,000, boosted by some of the additional $500,000 that Ladbrokes invested in the series this year. "Benno26" was also the recipient of a six-figure payday, collecting $130,815 for his efforts.

Ladbrokes md Edward Ihre said that LEOCOP had been another successful competition for the company, with player registrations for the series reaching 4,360.

"We attracted a good field and the money added generated a record-breaking prize pool of gigantic proportions for the 600-plus main event runners," he said.

"Hahila", who put up $100+$1 to enter the main event, triumphed over a stellar field that included former World Series of Poker bracelet winners, WSOP final tablists and final tablists in the World Series of Poker Europe. The Danish player is a regular at Ladbrokes Poker and his main event win pushed him up to second place (and an extra $3,000) on the LEOCOP Leaderboard. The top 80 players on the leaderboard, along with the winners of each LEOCOP IV event, will be invited to play in the Masters Event on November 22nd.

The winner of the Masters will be awarded a seat in the semi-finals of the Poker Million, guaranteed a minimum $20,000 payout for being in the semi-finals with the potential to win a million dollar first prize.

While Hahila was showing the main event players how to win, countryman Peter Eastgate — at 22 years old the youngest player at the final table — was competing in the last lap of the World Series of Poker at the Rio in Las Vegas. Having survived an entry field of literally thousands of players in the main event, Eastgate has been cooling his heels for some time thanks to a decision by television executives to hold the final table in November, 117 days after the nine survivors won through to final table status.

In a fourteen-hour session Sunday, PokerStars-sponsored Eastgate and Russian player Ivan Demidov emerged as the last two players standing and will compete for the $9.1 million first prize this week. Both players are guaranteed multi-million dollar prizes for their skill and fortitude in getting this far, but if Eastgate manages to take the game he will become the youngest ever player to hold a WSOP Main Event bracelet.

Elsewhere in the online poker world, the tenth edition of the Full Tilt Online Poker Series continued to deliver plenty of action and big money prizes, pulling in substantial entry fields. The $300+$22 buy-in NLHE event was hosted by poker great Howard Lederer and offered a guaranteed $1.5 million prize pool.

With an entry field of 5,370 players that guarantee was easily exceeded, providing a total pool of $1,611,000 for the event and $277,929 and change for the winner, "bigdogpckt5s" and his second placed heads up opponent "xTheory" who took home $168,349.